Day Three: Three of Cups, "Abundance"

My Inference:

I imagine I'm looking at lotus flowers, pouring something representative of bounty over pomegranates. Lots of fertility and prosperity implications. Because I'm not reading this as prophetic, my initial reaction is that either I should focus my efforts on obtaining fiscal security, or I should "count my blessings."

Ziegler:

It seems my instincts were on the right track. These are lotuses and pomegranates. The material flowing from the lotuses is "love of the highest order...available to be shared with only a small circle of people." Ziegler describes relationships with those closest to us as "rare gifts," and continues, "Care for them with respect and gratitude." So the abundance this card represents is that of love.

Rider-Waite:

Waite's reading is more related to the material, but the image in his deck still implies a sisterly bond. His reading includes the keywords "victory," "fulfillment," "solace," and "healing." 

Combined Reading:

I take this card as a hint to share my blessings, material or otherwise, with those who mean the most to me. Make the next discretionary expense a gift, or a family trip. Share my talents with others. When I am strong, support someone who does not feel strong. If you love someone, show it in a way that is meaningful and personal.

With this message and others I have read in Ziegler's work, I find it interesting that an egomaniac like Crowley would so often inject themes of love and generosity into his deck.

Day Two: Nine of Disks, "Gain"

My Inference: 

As with many minor arcana cards, the imagery in this one consists mostly of archaic symbols. Because I lack a deep understanding of astrology, alchemy, and Qaballah, I'll have to defer to the Ziegler guide. I do recognize the vague outline of the Tree of Life, with the upper and lower three Sephiroth marked by disks. Three disks in the center lack icons, but I imagine their colors are significant.

Ziegler:

"The three disks in the center symbolize the unification of love (pink), wisdom (blue), and creativity (green). The central binding force is love, whose color is visible through the other two." The heads are those of the artist Frieda Harris, Crowley, and Israel Regardie (a prominent occultist and contemporary of Crowley). Skipping past an extensive analysis of the placement of the heads, Ziegler arrives at the central message of the card: "Gain comes from giving willingly and lovingly...giving yourself to the universe; giving yourself fully to life. The cosmic law of wealth is hereby fulfilled: The more I give the more I receive."

There is some implication of the New Age concept of "Give and you shall receive" in Ziegler's reading. Naturally, a skeptic does not accept the position that our universe rewards (or punishes) actions. As I posted earlier, a phenomenon must either be demonstrated as occurring, or its possibility must be theoretically explainable. "Karma," as it is commonly called (however inaccurately), satisfies neither criterion. However, if we shift the focus of our interpretation from "giving" to "getting," we arrive at a reading that is compatible with a rationalist mindset: Realize your chosen purpose, collaborate, remember that as effort increases, so do rewards.

Rider-Waite:

A.E. Waite's less complex reading of the Nine of Pentacles basically amounts to taking inventory of one's accomplishments.

Combined Reading:

Material gain is not always an individual pursuit. Work with others to your mutual benefit. Meditate on the concepts of dedication, effort, and collaboration.

Day One: Queen of Disks

I began my experiment today by drawing the Queen of Disks:

My Inference:

After a journey or struggle, the queen surveys what lays behind her. She contemplates the fruits of effort.

Ziegler:

In his booklet, Ziegler describes the card as I intuited: Our queen sits in a refreshing oasis, taking time to "look back on her long and difficult path."

Rider-Waite:

Waite's reading is compatible with Ziegler's. The subject of the RW version of this card reflects on her status. Contemplate your own security or lack thereof.

Combined Reading:

After meditating on the image and consulting the other two sources, I get a clear message from this card: Contemplate the positive results of your actions. Whatever labor you endure, keep the end in mind. Be aware of where your efforts lead you and take care to preserve what you have earned.

The skeptic shouldn't disagree much with this card's ostensible meaning. Common interpretations do not involve prophecy, but solid advice for anyone. I suspect that every card I draw, when read with a rationalist mindset, will carry an obvious, universally applicable message. This must necessarily be so, since disbelief in the miraculous means not being surprised by omens.

Still, if you haven't recently paused to consider the consequences of a course of actions you are currently taking, or to evaluate any threats to your hard-earned assets, perhaps this image can remind you to do so.

Forming a Tarot Plan

Since there is no reason to associate the Tarot with supernatural power, there is no cosmic mandate regarding its use -- no rules, no consequences for handling it wrongly. You can use it for whatever purpose you wish, in any manner you like. Play card games, frame your favorite cards and hang them for display, use them as a prop in a tabletop role playing game. In my case, as stated earlier, I wish to use them as the foci of regular meditations.

In this context, I define "meditation" as the taking of a few minutes to reflect on my life at that moment. Even without the spiritual baggage that meditation often carries, the act of calming oneself and getting lost in one's thoughts can still be beneficial. A directed meditation -- a period of a few minutes spent contemplating a specific topic -- could be a chance to "get your bearings," to quietly brainstorm.

We get so consumed with thoughts regarding works in progress, appointments, our children's school performance, work projects, and other specific "to do list"-type items that we fail to take time to work on understanding who we are and how we fit in the world. Asking myself, for example, "How would others define me?" or "How do I impact others at work?" or "What am I doing to achieve my most valued goals?" challenges my often distorted self-image. Each of us are just as inaccurate in our understanding of ourselves as others are in their understanding of us.

A rationalist values objectivity. Information is more effective the better it maps onto reality. Reality is not fully understood by anyone; we each grasp more or less of it, depending on the amount and quality of the information we store in our brains. If a stimulus, like a randomly drawn Tarot card, inspires me to question how I define myself, my work, my status as a father, citizen, or artist, then I may find myself confronting a hard truth, or considering a strategy that I didn't think enough about previously.

There is nothing miraculous about this. A meditation on the Tarot is like talking to oneself. Or you might compare it to flipping idly through television channels, until something inspires you to take action -- ordering Chinese take-out, calling your mother, organizing a family game night, whatever the case may be.

The Method

One could invent whatever process they wish to explore the Tarot. There are no rules, no matter what the supernaturalists might claim. You can work your way through the deck sequentially, or draw cards at random. Lay out a full spread, or draw one card at a time. Consult existing interpretations, or make up your own. Use multiple cards to tell a story, or consider each card as carrying a unique message. Your deck, your rules. In fact, you might not even care to use the Tarot as I do, for the purpose of inspiring reflections on real life; perhaps you are an actor, and you'd like to treat each card as a character trait you want to explore, or the subject of an improvisation exercise. Maybe you're a writer, and you could weave a narrative from a string of cards, then see if it can be turned into your next short story. This deck is a dumb object, a subject of reflection. Never think of it as more than what it is -- a mass-produced collection of images. It is a prop, which could be wiped from existence with no consequence. Avoid the impulse to imbue it with personality or intrinsic meaning. It has always been, and will always be a deck of cards.

Here is my personal approach that I'll be using as I regularly consult the deck and report to this blog:

• Shuffle the deck, and draw a single card from the Crowley Thoth Tarot.
• Spend a few minutes gazing at the images on the card, allowing my imagination to respond however it will. Then record my initial impressions of the image.
• Consult Tarot: Mirror of the Soul by Gerd Ziegler, to compare my initial impression with that of the "initiated," and perhaps to learn more of the symbolism that I might not have caught.
• For the benefit of the reader, consult Arthur Edward Waite's Pictorial Key to the Tarot, which applies more to the Rider-Waite Tarot.
• Combine my personal insight, and both published interpretations into a message that can be useful for contemplation, and generally applicable to multiple versions of the Tarot.

Two Rules

Okay, I suppose a couple of rules have to be followed, no matter what your personal method. These should be pretty obvious to the skeptic:

1. Avoid the temptation to prophecy. This is not an exercise in fortune-telling. 
2. Tarot interpretations that prophecy good or bad fortune must be converted into something less predictive. For example, "betrayal" becomes "risk of betrayal."

Beginning with the next entry, I will share my experiences of reading the cards, one at a time. If all goes as hoped, even if you stripped my journal of Tarot jargon, you'd have a nice collection of subjects for personal reflection.

Crowley, True Will, and the Thoth Deck

Aleister Crowley is defined as many things by followers and critics -- prophet, hedonist, satanist, magician. In a characteristically egotistical fashion, he even labeled himself "The Beast 666." If a man's notoriety can be measured by the myths and anecdotes that surround him, Crowley may be among the most notorious people who ever lived. Naturally, much of what is alleged about him is the product of fantasy and rumor; and he certainly contributed to his own mythicization.

Crowley was born to a fundamentalist Christian family, but quickly rejected the faith of his parents. He attended Cambridge, and took an interest in mountaineering and poetry. Soon after, he joined an occult group known as the Golden Dawn, which taught Hermetic philosophy -- a system of western mysticism that promoted astrology, alchemy and theurgy.

His world travels exposed him to Hinduism and Buddhism, which strongly influenced his own formation of a new religion, which he called Thelema. Its primary tenet was "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law." This is often misconstrued as "Do whatever you wish," but instead is an affirmation of the hermeticist's ideal of connecting with a "higher self," in hopes of discovering one's singular purpose. Crowley's semi-autobiographical novel Diary of a Drug Fiend allegorizes the journey to discover one's True Will; in the story, after carousing through Europe on a drug binge, the protagonist discovers Thelema, and sobers up after discovering his passion for aircraft engineering (his "Anti-Drug," as it were).

It is difficult to take an interest in a prolific historical figure while avoiding our natural tendency to define ourselves as "for" or "against" that person. We can study Hitler with fascination, yet remain repulsed by his actions. What do I think of Crowley? I can't say I'm a fan or a critic; he was what he was.

I believe Crowley to have been the product of a rare alignment of catalytic circumstances. He lived during an era of new Romanticism. Westerners had become fascinated with the occult; the spiritualist movement was peaking. Crowley himself possessed a massive ego, likely distorted by his copious use of mind-altering drugs. His socially deviant personality may have been partly borne out of a repressive upbringing, then bolstered by the pride of having seen many exotic parts of the world. He was surely intelligent enough to cast a critical eye on superstition and miracles; but he is living proof that intelligence is no guarantee against credulity. Marry credulity with ego, and don't be surprised if you get a self-proclaimed prophet.

Crowley spent years collaborating with artist Lady Frieda Harris on a revised Tarot deck. The resulting Thoth Deck is less centered on Judeo-Christian symbolism, and incorporates images drawn from Eastern and Egyptian myth. He also claimed to draw ideas from science and philosophy.

There are hundreds of Tarot Decks that have been published throughout the centuries. I personally chose the Thoth deck for this project mostly because I happened to have it handy, but I also like the more culturally inclusive symbolism. For the benefit of the reader, in my readings I will compare cards drawn from the Thoth Deck to the perhaps most commonly known Rider-Waite deck.

An Objective Look at Tarot and Divination

Today, we understand that the Tarot is a deck of cards used primarily for divination purposes, but it originated as a deck of playing cards. Many early occultists who, like many modern ones, claimed to have access to ancient esoteric knowledge traced the deck to ancient Egypt, where much divine wisdom allegedly originated. 

There are some problems with this story: First, we have no record of Tarot in Egyptian lore. Connections drawn between the modern deck and Egyptian mythology are based largely on the imagery that was added to the cards' artwork centuries after the invention of the deck. We also know that the deck was used for card games well before its first recorded uses as a means of divination.

What we do know is that if something exists, the occult community will appropriate it -- animal entrails, tea leaves, the lines on our palms, the bumps in our heads, the stars in the sky. Regular playing cards were already being used for divination before the Tarot.

There is no reason to believe in the efficacy of any method of divination. For a claim to be true it must satisfy at least one of these criteria: It must be theoretically possible, and it must be proven effective in trials. 

No one can offer an explanation for the Tarot's ability to predict the future that does not contradict what we know about time and causality. How would information travel backward in time? Tarot believers might use language that sounds academic, involving terms like "energy" and "spirit," but these are nebulous concepts that lack a standard definition, let alone empirical verification. 

Never minding how it would work, does it work at all? That is easy to test. While the Tarot specifically doesn't seem to have been the subject of much testing, other forms of divination, like astrology and dowsing, have been soundly debunked many times over. If anyone does think they can prove the Tarot's effectiveness at predicting the future, the James Randi Educational Foundation has a million dollar prize waiting for them.

None of this means the deck is useless to the skeptic. I have read the Bible since I deconverted from Christianity, but out of interest in the book as a work of historical literature. Just as an atheist can enter a cathedral and marvel at the artwork, or experience the bliss of listening to Bach's sacred music, so also a rationalist can appreciate the Tarot as a work of art, and a product of human tradition that calls to attention our shared struggles and desires. Discard all claims of supernatural power, and what remains is a picture book that speaks of universal human experiences. 

Defining Skepticism

Before I begin sharing my daily readings, I want to describe my personal world view, so that you might understand the filter through which I'll be interpreting the Tarot.

I am a skeptic. Not in the usual sense of the word, meaning one who doubts, but as in the original Greek meaning "one who inquires." To put it most simply, a skeptic is someone who asks questions. Most often, the term is applied in the context of supernatural or pseudoscientific claims. In these cases, we may specify a particular brand of skepticism, known as "scientific skepticism," or "rational skepticism."

A scientific skeptic generally adheres to the following principles, not out of devotion to a subjective philosophy, but because these principles are axiomatic (i.e. self-evident):

• The burden of proof lies on the person making a positive claim. In other words, my being unable to disprove something is not evidence of its existence.
• Logical fallacies used to support a claim do not meet sufficient standards of proof. On the flip side, the existence of a logical fallacy does not in itself disprove a claim. Basically, fallacies are useless as evidence for or against a claim.
• The scientific method is the best means we have for learning about the nature of reality, because it requires validation and is self-correcting.
• The most reasonable assumption when evaluating a claim is to withold belief until evidence proves otherwise. 
• The strength of evidence must be in proportion to the incredibleness of a claim. As Carl Sagan put it, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." For example, if I told you my kids go to school just down the street, you have little reason to demand more evidence before accepting the claim. But if I said they go to school at Hogwart's, the claim becomes more unrealistic, and therefore you would be reasonable to demand some strong evidence before accepting it.

There are some additional principles that are useful in evaluating the truth of a claim, which we have learned through science:

• Human memory is not only subjective, but very malleable. Memories are highly unreliable.
• Confirmation bias is difficult to avoid, even by a very rational person. We have an innate tendency to recall evidence that supports what we wish to believe, and discard or forget that which does not.
• Statistics and probability elude our inherited thinking processes. Nonintuitive things happen when data sets grow larger, and we tend to overvalue results drawn from small data sets. For example, it seems near impossible that you specifically would win the lottery twice, but not so impossible that it would happen to one person out of all who play the lottery.
• Cognitive dissonance, combined with social reinforcement, allows irrational ideas to thrive, even as society becomes more scientifically savvy.

Finally, some personal conclusions I have drawn:

• There is a difference between what one wishes to believe and what one has reason to believe.
• Concepts like "belief" and "faith," which seem to be considered virtuous by the general population, have no value or effectiveness when dealing with reality.

The above statements must be taken into account when reading my interpretations of the Tarot. Next, I will take a broad look at the Tarot: its history, its design, and its use.

Presenting a Skeptical Reading of the Tarot

This blog is a journal of my experience attempting to reconcile the Tarot, specifically the Crowley/Thoth deck, with a rationalist, materialist view of the universe.

What's the point? Allow me to begin with a brief self-introduction. I was raised in a strict Protestant environment, and until I was in my 30's, remained a devout Christian. But some questions nagged me: How did I know my faith was true, and others were not? By what external authority can the Bible  be validated? Is what I learned in my religion classes all there is to know about spirituality, or can I dig deeper? 

At first, these questions led to an interest in Hermetic mysticism -- Kaballah combined with Golden Dawn-derived teachings about applied magick and related topics. It felt silly at times, and highly inconvenient (Try maintaining a relationship with a fiancee while performing daily banishing rituals at a homemade altar); but I felt there must be something more to religion than prayer and worship. 

Eventually, I dropped my interest in magick, deciding that it amounted to little more than positive thinking woo. Shortly after that, I abandoned religious faith entirely. I am a product of the new internet atheist movement -- a loyal SGU listener, a reader of Sagan and Hitchens. The greatest positive change in my life did not come through rituals or church fellowship, but through the realization that we have one short life, and then it's over. 

Recently, while sifting through a junk drawer, I came across my copy of the Crowley Thoth version of the Tarot deck, and felt a twinge of nostalgia. I still appreciate the beautiful artwork and imagery in the Tarot, and how the cards so effectively organize symbolic archetypes -- concepts that are universal to the human experience. How, I wondered, could I use this deck for something that did not require a belief in the supernatural? 

By "supernatural," I not only mean pertaining to occult forces. I also consider the alleged effects of "positive thinking," touted by self-help gurus, to be mostly in conflict with what science tells us about nature. 

I decided to explore the deck from a rationalist perspective, and make it the subject of regular meditations. Not meditations of the transcendental type, but moments of calm introspection. How can an image containing symbols that are relevant to our shared human experiences stimulate a personal reflection on one's present condition? Our thoughts, actions, relationships, desires...they deserve careful inspection, and why not use the Tarot as a springboard? 

I will post my insights to this blog as I progress through regular, random drawings from the deck. Each card will be interpreted against established readings of its meaning. My goal is to strip the Tarot of its occult foundations and treat it more as I would a Rorschach blot, or Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies deck.